Microformats – hCard

Even though I have been working in the IT industry (study and work) for about 6 years now, the learning never seems to stop. The other day while surfing the net, I came across Microformats, a brilliant idea I am surprised I am coming across only now.

Microformats are small additions one makes to the HTML code of their pages (mainly class, rel and rev attributes) to make their data more readable by machines without affecting the layout for users. Microformats allow / will allow a number of different applications to extract information like event info, contact info etc into organiser software. At the moment, microformats are supported by the likes of Yahoo and Google. There is also talk that microformats will help you /your site rank better in search engines, which should get most webmasters and SEO companies pretty excited. I am still in the beginner stages of knowing everything about microformats, so I apologise for any mistakes.

The most well known microformats are

hCard – Used to give vCard style info.

hCalendar – Event info.

XFN – (XHTML Friend Network): Specify relationship info in hyperlinks

I am going to try tackling each of these three microformats one at a time, starting with the hCard.

There are many many more classes you can add to add more information.
You can also specify the ‘type’ where there could be multiple types of information, for example, your phone number can be home, work, fax, cell etc. There is even a firefox plugin known as Operator, which is able to read and identify the microformats on a page, check it out, pretty cool